Behind the Couch

As the director of Night of the Living Dead (1968), George Romero will be remembered as one of the major pioneers of the modern horror film. A truly groundbreaking work, it was released just eight years after Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), and like that film,  Night of the Living Dead similarly suggested that monsters can live right next door to us. Indeed, Romero took this notion one step further by suggesting that it is us who are the monsters. Several sequels followed, all of which provided socio-political commentary against the backdrop of a world where the dead return to life and consume the living, an examination of the human condition, and how ordinary people faced with extraordinary, unprecedented events struggle to survive. The horror in these films stems from the things people do to themselves and each other when the world as we know it comes shuddering to an end and humanity fragments and literally eats itself. Following on from Romero's previous Dead film, the am...

The Dead Outside is Scottish filmmaker Kerry Anne Mullaney’s feature directorial debut. Gripping, atmospheric and quietly unsettling, the film unfolds as a post-apocalyptic psychological horror tale of loneliness, loss and madness. A mysterious neurological pandemic has ravaged Britain. Two survivors seek refuge in an isolated farmhouse in deepest, darkest Scotland. The pair forge a tenuous relationship until the arrival of a stranger throws everything into turmoil. As well as dealing with serious trust issues, the three must also fend off attacks from the infected population besieging the farmhouse on an increasingly frequent basis… The Dead Outside screened at the first Yellow Fever Independent Film Festival in Belfast last year and received several awards at the 10th Annual Estepona International Horror & Fantasy Film Festival, as well as garnering nominations from the likes of Frightfest, Night of Horror and BAFTA Scotland. It was released to DVD this week and I was for...